The nation’s arts community is atwitter with apprehension, doubt, and mild public protests over President Donald Trump’s recent decision to overhaul the leadership of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Recently, on Feb. 7, Trump fired the arts complex’s chairman David Rubenstein and dismissed board members appointed by former president Joe Biden.
"We are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN," Trump announced on his Truth Social platform, noting that those he removed "do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture . . . THE BEST IS YET TO COME!"
Trump appointed 14 new Kennedy Center board members, including political associates and well known Palm Beach, Florida philanthropists.
Once installed, they unanimously elected Trump the Kennedy Center’s new chairman and fired its longtime president Deborah Rutter, who planned to depart later in the year.
The board’s treasurer quit, as did two artistic advisers.
Two guest artists canceled one-performance engagements scheduled for later this season.
The center announced the cancelation of two works with purported gay themes, but the decisions appear to have been made earlier and were unrelated to Trump’s takeover.
Politics aside, Trump’s interest in the Kennedy Center presents an enormous opportunity.
Never before has a president of the United States assumed a personal leadership role in a major arts organization.
The presidency’s patronage and prestige virtually guarantee a massive flood of federal arts funding in support of projects that esteem the nation as it approaches the 250th anniversary celebrations planned for 2026.
Washington will be a focal point for those observances.
The Kennedy Center, a public-private partnership founded in 1958 and operational from 1971, should be those efforts' headquarters.
Investing in the arts complex complements Trump’s campaign promise to clean up Washington, which under Biden once again became a cesspool of crime, drugs, and blight, and to present a more positive image of the United States at home and abroad.
How the Kennedy Center’s previous leadership would have observed the country’s 250th anniversary is anyone’s guess, but a cursory review of some of its recent programming did not augur well for festivities that most Americans would enjoy.
Pages now removed from the Kennedy Center’s website listed multiple drag events of the type Trump described, including "Broadway Drag Brunch," "Dancing Queens Drag Brunch," "A Drag Salute to Divas," and "Dragtastic Dress-Up."
A production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker," a Christmastime ballet favorite that is a staple of almost every major American dance company, presented a "diversity" theme completely alien to the work.
The musical "&Juliet" reimagined William Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" as a feminist critique of society in which Juliet runs away from Romeo for a lesbian relationship.
A pre-pandemic production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera "Don Giovanni" staged by Washington National Opera, which performs at the Kennedy Center, presented the title character’s romantic conquests as his "survivors" and was introduced by a panel discussion consisting entirely of left-wing women, some of whom have publicly supported the cancelation of men accused without evidence of sexual harassment.
What could be less American than that?
Little information indicates how this type of programming has served the Kennedy Center’s larger mission, which purports that it "presents world-class art by the artists that define our culture today, delivers powerful arts education opportunities nationwide, and embodies the ideals of President Kennedy in all the Center’s activities."
President John F. Kennedy was a Democrat, but no scholarship on his abbreviated presidency has revealed any predilection for balletic diversity rewrites, same-sex fantasies, or drag subculture.
Nor could even the grumpiest protester performing an interpretive dance outside his memorial theater complex pretend that our most recently martyred president would have survived "#MeToo."
Before Trump’s takeover the Kennedy Center’s self-curated public image inspired little confidence. Its facilities, which received $23 million in federal funding for upkeep in fiscal year 2025, are neglected and dingy.
They are sorely in need of renovation.
Last June, this writer personally saw mice running around in the center’s opera house, its biggest theater, during a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s last opera "Turandot," the ending of which was absurdly rewritten to make the opera’s title character a victim of rape culture.
The Center’s new "REACH" event space is an ugly, brutalist monstrosity that recalls a bomb shelter in the former Yugoslavia.
On Feb. 12, U.S. Special Envoy Rick Grenell, whom Trump appointed interim director, posted that the Kennedy Center has "ZERO cash on hand. And ZERO in reserves" and noted that its "deferred maintenance is a crisis."
At the same time, however, it somehow found the resources to pay Ms. Rutter $1.4 million per year and observe a woke "land acknowledgment" still posted on its website to "honor with gratitude" Native American tribes who were "the stewards of this land throughout the generations."
And just where was their arts complex?
Fortunately, Trump and his new board have much to work with.
The Kennedy Center features some 2,200 performances a year.
Many are of high-quality and could be bolstered by even more ambitious and appealing offerings while uninspired and pandering DEI productions are phased out.
The National Symphony, under its splendid music director Gianandrea Noseda, stands as one of the world’s leading orchestras and presents excellent concert programs to appreciative audiences who see more in the classics than they might perceive in BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) comedy shows and questionable street art packaged partially at taxpayer expense as "social impact" content.
Elevating the best will make the Kennedy Center great again, and our nation's 47th commander in chief has a historic opportunity to gift such excellence to the nation.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.